NPR leaving OnlyKlans: six months on, they barely felt a thing

How interesting to read in Nieman Reports that six months on, NPR has barely felt a thing after leaving OnlyKlans, the site formerly known as Twitter. NPR told its staff that its traffic has dropped by ‘a single percentage point’, according to Nieman Reports, and before that, traffic from OnlyKlans made up less than two […]

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States of play for Facebook, Linkedin and OnlyKlans

Over a decade ago, I watched as Facebook intentionally broke organic reach and Lucire’s plummeted 90 per cent overnight. It was clear what Zuckerberg’s grift was: to get us to pay to boost posts. But there was already, back then, plenty of reasons you shouldn’t: it was buggy as heck. Fast forward to 2014 and […]

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Suspension might expose Mastodon’s following bugs

Mastodon continues to be buggy, and it reminds me of the failures I have seen on other platforms. As detailed earlier, spammers hit Mastodon.social (and, eventually, others), causing admins to limit their own instances’ connections with it. Two, Mastodon.nz and Koletiva.social, went further and suspended the connections. Due to poor documentation, as far as I […]

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Your preferences mean nothing to Google or Microsoft

I could just repeat my post from January 26. Let’s face it, Google is a notorious spammer, with a failing search engine, and an advertising business that’s a decent negligence lawsuit away from collapsing. It was 2011 when I showed everyone that your opt-out settings in Google Ads Preferences Manager were meaningless. Today, your email […]

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Confused Google doesn’t understand email preferences

As if to prove my point about lies, Google spammed me right after my last post. In its footer:     No, I didn’t. I logged into Google to see my settings. Sure enough:     As I always say, when it comes to computers, I’m right, they’re wrong. I have a better memory. I […]

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A dodgy 2000s’ UK spam list is still doing the rounds in 2022, pretending to be legit

  During February, I received spam from Novuna in the UK, the finance company that’s a subsidiary of Mitsubishi. It wasn’t personally addressed, it was just a general message. I complained via their complaints’ email, only to have the message bounce back as it wasn’t working. However, they did respond on Twitter, unlike less caring […]

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The pathetic snowflakes of Big Tech

We all know what will happen. This is one of two fakes who have sent me a Facebook friend request this week. The first was given the all-clear despite having spam links; and no doubt this will be judged to be perfectly acceptable by Facebook. (In the meantime, a post from Lucire that featured the […]

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It feels like half of Facebook is bot

Here’s a screenshot from the new members of one of my Facebook groups—actually the only public one I still have. Since Facebook lets spammers join now, we have to block them manually. Their posts don’t make it through to the group as we have safeguards there, too. But I’m not going to let them inflate, […]

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Time to stop entertaining advertorial enquiries from Gmail

Last month, I Tweeted that I would stop replying to advertorial queries sent to us from Gmail, since over 99 per cent of them result in no deal whatsoever. In fact, that 99 is an underestimate.    One of the early (say mid-1990s to the mid-2000s) rules of the ’net was that if you didn’t […]

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Despite being blatantly obvious, Facebook does nothing about thousands-strong bot nets

We already know that Facebook does nothing if you want to use scripts to join groups, even if the scripts all give roughly the same answers. Apparently that’s not enough to trigger the systems at this company that’s worth almost a billion dollars (that’s a proper billion, or what the Americans call a trillion). Unless, […]

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